In celebration of National Bird Day 2015, Barry Kent MacKay, Senior Program Associate for Born Free USA and lifelong bird enthusiast, is writing a special eight-part blog series in December and January where he will describe some interesting avian species. Below is the fifth installment.
“Barry!”
I ignored the call.
“Barry!”
It was my mother’s voice, but I was not to be fooled; I was not being an obstinate teenager. I just knew that…
“Barry! What’s the matter with you? Answer when I call!”
Oops. It was Mom, and by the sound of her voice, I was in trouble.[teaserbreak]
But, I had an excuse. You see, I was outside working, and I had twice before come indoors when I heard my mom call my name. Except it had not been my mother. It had been a common hill mynah we were taking care of, imitating her voice so perfectly that I had been fooled. So flawlessly had his voice matched hers, that when she really called, I thought it was still the mynah. I was not the only one. We were taking care of my infant nephew for my brother and sister-in-law while they worked, and so we had a diaper service. The delivery guy later confessed that he had once entered our living room upon hearing “come in” in response to his knock, and carried on a somewhat confused conversation with a hidden voice until he saw that he had been trying to talk to a mynah bird.
The hill mynah (also spelled “myna”; both are correct) has been “split” by ornithologists into up to five separate but very similar species occupying different parts of southern Asia. The most widely distributed is the “common” hill mynah. There is also the “southern” hill mynah of southwestern Asia and Sri Lanka; the “Nias” hill mynah, native to only two islands off the West coast of Sumatra; the Enggano hill mynah, found only on Enggano Island; and the Sri Lanka mynah, of Sri Lanka.
All are similar in appearance and habits. They are glossy-black birds with sharply white wing patches, orange beaks (blending to yellowish tips), buffy yellow feet, and unfeathered bright yellow wattles on the back of the head and, in all but the Sri Lanka mynah, on the side of the head, below the eye. Proportions are well-balanced but the tail is relatively short. The feathers on the top of the head are short and curly.
And, as the story I started with demonstrates, they are phenomenal mimics. With the possible exception of the African gray parrot, no species of bird can better imitate the human voice (or whistle and make many other sounds) than the hill mynah, making it a popular species in the exotic pet industry. Oddly enough, unlike the African gray parrot, they do not imitate the calls of other birds in the wild.
They can breed in captivity, but not easily, and demand outstrips supply, resulting in continued pressure on wild populations. From 1994 to 2003, more than 170,000 were taken from the wild and exported outside their south Asian homelands. Uncounted thousands more were caught for the domestic market. They are popular cage birds and, in Asia, curried mynah is considered a gastronomic treat.
Most of the birds caught were adults, thus ill-suited for the confinement of cages. Worse, some were attached by chains to t-bar stands. Conservationists were particularly concerned about the distinctive subspecies of common hill mynah found in Thailand and some other local populations of distinct forms that have seen their population sizes seriously depleted by commercial trade, both legal and illegal, as well as by habitat loss.
The good news, at least in terms of conservation, is that mynahs respond well to protection—and, as is true of the bluebirds in North America, they readily use nest boxes. By providing such boxes, numbers can be increased. In some areas, their taste for fruit causes them to be categorized as nuisance wildlife. A population of escaped or released common hill mynahs lives in the wild in Florida, where they do not seem to have caused serious concerns among most fruit growers. They will also eat nectar, flowers, insects, and small vertebrate animals such as tiny lizards, but mostly they eat fruit, especially figs.
There are three major problems associated with keeping them captive. If fed correctly, on a predominately fruit-based diet, their droppings are very messy. Keeping them clean is an endless chore, and people who have them are often reluctant to allow them out of their cages, so messy are they. They also have a habit of throwing bits of fruit about the room, even through the bars of cages.
The second problem is that they are continually being removed from the wild in response to the demand of the pet trade. This has put some populations at risk of endangerment, though the species is not at all endangered overall.
Third, they can be horribly noisy. One mynah given to me to care for had a scream so loud that it drove its owner to distraction. Not all of them are that loud, but it can be a problem. Too often, people tire of the novelty and get rid of them. Such was the source of the bird we had when I was a kid—and, in fact, all of the mynahs I’ve ever had. (I would never, ever contribute to the exotic pet trade by buying one.)
Mynahs are members of the starling family; indeed, the name “starling” and “mynah” are somewhat interchangeable. Depending on technical details involving classification, there are about 114 species of starlings and mynahs, native to Eurasia, Africa, Australia, and Oceania, but none are native to the Western Hemisphere. They include some highly iridescent, quite beautiful species, a few with long tails and odd crests.
However, one species, the common starling, is not only abundant across temperate North America, having been released here in the 19th Century—but it is widely and unfairly reviled, partly because it forms huge flocks. Common mynahs don’t do that in the wild, and can’t survive the colder weather that we have in winter across most of the continent. In their native lands, they may form an important function of cross pollinating fruit trees. However, we tend not to know which species pose a risk to our own interests until it is too late.